


Missing Time

by gwinne



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-27 19:45:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15031907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwinne/pseuds/gwinne
Summary: post-ep for "Requiem," written the summer after it first aired





	Missing Time

Mulder and I have driven thousands of miles, on interstates and highways and  
backwoods rural roads. We have eaten at D.C.'s finest restaurants and the  
sleaziest diners from Washington to Florida. He has bought me more side  
salads from McDonalds than I can count and fed me mango slices in bed. I have  
fallen asleep with my head against his shoulder in hospital waiting rooms, in  
airplanes and Lariat rental cars, on his couch and mine. But I have spent  
less than fifty nights in his bed. Far less. We have watched some of the  
worst movies ever made and some of the best, but never my favorite. I'm not  
sure I ever even told him what it is.

At Skinner's request, I'm taking a few days off. Time to heal, he says, but I  
think he just hasn't figured out what to do with a pregnant agent from the  
bureau's most unwanted department, an unpartnered agent at that. So I'm in  
bed, wearing a gray t-shirt of Mulder's, cataloguing things we have done and  
things we haven't. If I'm feeling optimistic, the second list is comprised of  
things I would like to do with Mulder, when he comes home to me. He always  
comes home.

Honestly, I'm feeling better. Not fine, but better. I've spent most of my  
time off curled next to the toilet, to the point that I vomited up blood. The  
technical name for my condition is hyperemesis gravidarum. In other words,  
excessive pregnancy induced puking. What I didn't tell Mulder the night I  
knocked on his motel room door, shivering and nauseous, was that I'd thrown up  
both times I'd used the restroom on the plane, once after my meeting with the  
auditor, and again right after dinner. That's why I didn't give him a hard  
time when he suggested--ok, insisted--that I forget about the missing deputy  
and go home. I'd like to think that if Mulder were here, he'd be playing the  
role of supportive partner, in the more intimate sense of the word, something  
I've only recently come to enjoy. I'd like to think he'd pour me tall glasses  
of Gatorade (for the electrolytes) and hold me until the room stops spinning,  
that he'd go to the store at two in the morning when I decide I actually am  
hungry and we have nothing worth eating in the kitchen. 

I've spent most of the morning constructing intricate, sappy-as-Hallmark  
scenarios in my head about the day Mulder comes home and I get to tell him  
about the baby. Sometimes I'm not even showing and sometimes I'm huge as Moby  
Dick and sometimes there's a baby girl with his brown hair and my blue eyes  
sleeping in a bassinette in our room. But every time I imagine telling him,  
we both begin to cry. And then we make love. That's a scenario I'd like to  
experience sooner rather than later.

In all likelihood, this baby was conceived the first time Mulder and I made  
love, the night he returned home from England and I told him about Daniel.  
There's something magical in that, and I love thinking about that night,  
captured in a series of snapshots in my mind. The one I cherish most is  
looking down at Mulder, whose large hands tenderly hold my hair back my face,  
the moment I come. I've seen that look before, whenever Mulder witnesses  
something amazing, like the spaceship in Antarctica, but this time there is a  
tenderness I never imagined. That was all the proof I ever needed. I regret  
few things in my life, but I do regret leaving him asleep that morning, even  
if it was only to go home and change before I picked him up for work, coffee  
and bagels in hand. At that moment, zipping my FBI regulation skirt in  
Mulder's bathroom, I was already a few hours pregnant. If only we'd known,  
what would we have done differently?

For one, I wouldn't have gotten drunk with him watching Caddyshack or downed  
glasses of wine in a Hollywood bathtub. I wouldn't have let him talk me into  
trying sushi on our first real date. I wouldn't have gone with him to Oregon  
and I wouldn't have let him go back. But there's not much point speculating  
about what might have been, what could have been, what should have been. It's  
the future I have to think about now, his and mine, tangibly interwoven in the  
strands of DNA replicating in my womb. 

Still, I can't help but miss him, miss our time together, both the time that  
was and the time that could have been. I never told Mulder that T.S. Eliot is  
my favorite poet, and I think often of these lines from his "Burnt Norton":  
"Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to  
one end, which is always present." The present is my missing time, my  
grieving time, my hopeful time.

Mulder and I have played baseball and Battleship; we have gone shopping for  
pomegranates and avocados at three in the morning; we have made love in the  
bathtub and made out like teenagers on his couch. We have never fucked on our  
office desk or in the backseat of a rental car. We have never spent an entire  
weekend naked. We have never even spent an entire weekend alone, without the  
pretext of a case.

We have colored outside the lines with a dying three-year-old but we have  
never changed a dirty diaper or given our newborn daughter a bath. We have  
shared seven anniversaries but celebrated none of them with champagne. We  
have slow danced to "Walking in Memphis" but never to random oldies from a  
jukebox. I never taught him to tango. I never told him how much I love him.  
I never told him I wanted more than anything to be the mother of his children,  
for him to be the father of mine. I wanted this long before I learned I was  
barren, since a conversation on a park bench on a crisp autumn in Home,  
Pennsylvania.

Maybe I place his hand on my belly. Maybe I whisper in his ear. Maybe I hand  
him the results from the amniocentesis. Maybe Frohike tells him. Maybe  
Skinner tells him. Maybe he just knows. I'd like to think he just knows.


End file.
